SUSPECT'S SECOND TRIAL BEGINS IN 1983 SLAYING

Patricia Nigro's body was found on Jan. 21, 1983, stuffed in a stereo carton in a dumpster behind a neighborhood tavern in Fort Lauderdale. She was the city's first murder victim that year.

Patrick James Thompson was called the killer on Wednesday in opening arguments of his trial on a first-degree murder charge in Broward Circuit Court. Thompson, who was previously convicted of the killing and sentenced to death, won a new trial last year.

Assistant State Attorney Kelly Hancock told the 12-member jury that the key question in the trial is: "How did she get in that box in that dumpster?"

Hancock contends that, based upon circumstantial evidence -- including a hair found on Nigro's body and a single fingerprint found inside the stereo carton -- that Thompson put her there.

The hair and fingerprint matched Thompson's, Hancock said.

"Circumstantial evidence is very compelling and very real," Hancock said. "In murder cases, we don't have eyewitnesses because the witness is usually dead."

Evan Baron, Thompson's attorney, agreed that the print was his client's. But the print cannot prove when Thompson touched the box, he said.

"There were numerous smudges, numerous prints on that box," Baron said. "Unfortunately for Mr. Thompson, the only print that was identifiable was (his)."

Nigro had moved to South Florida from Connecticut only a few weeks before her death, attorneys said. She recently had divorced and wanted to start over. She had moved in with her new boyfriend and his mother in Miami Shores.

The day she disappeared, Nigro was in the Fort Lauderdale area, possibly to visit relatives. She was driving her boyfriend's 1976 Cadillac Seville when she apparently got stuck in some soft sand in the 2900 block of Northwest 33rd Avenue in Lauderdale Lakes.

Her body was found the next day in a dumpster behind a bar in the 5700 block of Northwest 31st Avenue, Fort Lauderdale. She had been severely beaten and choked to death.

Thompson, 30, was arrested almost a year after Nigro's body was discovered. His name surfaced because of an FBI suspect profile and the matching of his fingerprint with the print on the stereo box.

But Baron told jurors that police failed to investigate the case thoroughly. One witness who claimed to see Thompson talking to Nigro originally said both were "Latin-looking" -- but Nigro was blonde and Thompson has fair skin, he said.

In addition, a man who told police that he helped throw the carton into the dumpster has insisted that Thompson is not the person he met that night, Baron said.

"There (are) numerous and abundant reasonable doubts," Baron said.

Thompson won the second trial in 1986 when the Florida Supreme Court ruled that improper evidence had been presented in the first trial in 1984.